(WND)—America will soon be going to the polls. In fact, in some cases, early voting for the crucial midterms has already begun.
In one form or another, especially in the example of Democratic Socialist candidates, I think it’s fair to say that in a number of places around America, communism is on the ballot this time around.
That’s an amazing turn of events in a nation where free enterprise has served us so well and allowed us to thrive and prosper as a nation.
A couple of months ago, I wrote a column on the Ten Commandments and how communism undermines and disobeys every one of them. But a reader, who supported the gist of what I wrote, felt the article fell short because I didn’t develop the point more fully about the commandment against lying.
The ninth commandment says, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” In short, we should not tell lies.
Since columns generally have a limited number of words, e.g., 800, here is a separate article by me on just that topic alone. (Hat tip to Stephen Martin.)
Communism is an assault on truth. Communists reject the existence of God. In effect, they make the state god. Furthermore, they claim that they can deliver the goods, that they can feed the people.
Instead, many starved, and many were oppressed, unto death. Historians Eugene Genovese and his wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese once published the Marxist Perspectives magazine, but then became disillusioned by communism. They told the National Review (1997) after the Soviet Union imploded: “When it all collapsed, the question was, after 70 years, what do we have to show for it? … tens of millions of corpses.”
In contrast, why has America historically succeeded in granting us freedom? It’s because the Founding Fathers recognized the fact of human sinfulness. They did everything in their power to limit how much power any one man or group of people might have. Belief in the sinfulness of man can be seen in the Constitution with its strict separation of powers.
The Bible says repeatedly that we are all sinners. When we are judged by God’s righteous standards, we learn there is no one good, no, not one.
Mankind tends toward evil. Therefore, power must be separated. I am not aware of a single example of any of the founders of America believing that man was basically good. This is not cynical. It’s just the reality and has led to the most prosperous forms of government – and economics too.
Here’s a sampling from America’s founders on man’s basic nature:
- During debates at the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, a key architect of our nation’s governing document, argued, “All men having power ought to be distrusted.”
- Thomas Jefferson said that power should be divided for everybody’s sake: “The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many.”
- Ben Franklin stated, “There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples’ money, then all their lands and then make them and their children servants forever.”
Our Constitution has endured because it was realistic about man’s nature and because it was predicated on the Declaration, which says our rights come from God. In contrast, communism is based on a lie: Man is basically good.
The former Soviet Union built their system of government on an atheistic, Marxist base – on the notion that man is basically good, but has been corrupted by capitalism and religion.
Marx thought that when the workers seized the means of production and the reins of government and imposed the workers’ state, then government would become unnecessary and wither away. (For documentation, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,”Samuel Moore, trans., Chicago: Henry Regnary Company, 1969, first published 1848, pp. 56-57.)
So, the new Soviet man or woman was to be free from religious superstitions and from the curse of selfishness as found in capitalism with its emphasis on private property. Who created a better system? The communists or America’s founders? The answer is so obvious.
Historian Paul Johnson said the 20th century state, in large part because of communism (which asserted the basic goodness of humanity), has proven to be the greatest killer of all time. (Paul Johnson, “Modern Times,” New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1983, p. 729.)
It is ironic that the main newspaper in the Soviet Union during its heyday was called “Pravda,” meaning “Truth.” Ironic because it pumped out content that was anything but the truth.
Capitalism and free enterprise often lead to human flourishing. In contrast, communism often leads to poverty, misery, tyranny and death. And that is the truth of the matter.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
